Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgments

Five summer awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities
gave me opportunities for research and collegial discussions
of my work. Matching one of its challenge grants, the
Elms College joined with the NEH to create a fund for development
of humanities faculty at the college. The Elms also provided...

1. Rhetorical Ethos and Dramatic Theory

This book investigates how a play in performance leads an audience
to accept its dramatic vision. That is to say, it raises a
basic question that rhetoric has asked of political speech for
centuries: How and how effectively does the work earn its credibility
and project its worth? Since rhetoric is broadly social in
its goals, it concerns itself with people acting communally...

2. Syntax, Style, and Ethos

The sentences that a dramatic artist shapes provide an actor,
dramaturg, and director the fundamental units for appreciating
and realizing a character. When sentence structure is an
artistic choice, its syntax is part of a rhetorical strategy. Indeed,
rhetorical critics from ancient times to the Renaissance often...

3. The Worth of Words

In the seventeenth century, John Dryden wrote when language
reformers attacked abstract words as meaningless, and in our
time, David Hare and others have written when words themselves
were reduced by some to marks on a page. In Dryden’s
time, “insignificant” was the pejorative attached to words like...

4. Memory and Ethos

In his valuable, comprehensive survey of memory in the Encyclopedia
of Rhetoric, William N. West notes “the vagueness of its
role in rhetoric,” yet other summary comments of his broaden
an understanding of memory beyond its use as a mnemonic to
a rhetorical place with clear theoretical applications to narrators...

5. Shaw, Ethos, and Rhetorical Wit

Unlike the authors of the escapist drama he castigated, G. B. Shaw
needed to create a credible ethos to persuade audiences to accept
his social positions. He articulated those positions with didactic
clarity in his ample prefaces and his theater criticism, and his
commitment to them as a public man was well known. His values
were current before the curtain rose on his plays with the result...

6. Athol Fugard’s Dramatic Rhetoric

In his introduction to the Samuel French edition of The Blood
Knot, Athol Fugard writes: “I am a South African, white skinned.
There are three million of us. There are also twelve million darkskinned
South Africans.”1 Since the premiere of that play in 1961,
such matters of fact about Fugard himself and South Africa in...

7. Rhetoric and Silence in Holocaust Drama

Only a relentless bigot would deny the factual reality of the Holocaust.
The “Is it?” of stasis theory is indisputable. The “What
is it?” inevitably pushes the language of any answer beyond the
connotations of words like horror and, as its application has extended
to other events, genocide. Humanistic literature, facing...

Conclusion

This study has argued that, from the basic elements of expression,
syntax, and the word, to the staging of a play, the ethical
proof of rhetoric has continuing critical relevance from Shakespeare’s
plays to Tom Stoppard’s. “Ethical proof” encompasses
the values that a play embodies, and “rhetoric,” the means...

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